{"id":667,"date":"2007-09-27T07:47:08","date_gmt":"2007-09-27T06:47:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=667"},"modified":"2007-09-27T07:47:08","modified_gmt":"2007-09-27T06:47:08","slug":"forgotten-world-104-turkmenistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=667","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten World (104): Turkmenistan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Turkmenistan\">Turkmenistan<\/a> has the smallest population &#8211; only 5 million &#8211; of the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia. It is made up mainly of desert, but it possesses the world&#8217;s fifth largest reserves of natural gas and has substantial deposits of oil. Naturally, therefore, it is of strategic interest to both the Russians and the Americans.<br \/>\nHowever, since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991,  Turkmenistan has remained largely closed to the outside world. It is effectively a one-party state, that party being the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan led by the late president Saparmurat Niyazov until his death in December 2006.<br \/>\nIn contrast to other former Soviet republics,Turkmenistan has been largely free of inter-ethnic hostilities. This is probably because it is the most ethnically homogeneous of the Central Asian republics, the vast majority of its population consisting of Turkmens. According to a decree of the Peoples&#8217; Council, electricity, natural gas, water and iodised salt will be provided free of charge to citizens up to 2030; however, shortages are frequent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Turkmenistan has the smallest population &#8211; only 5 million &#8211; of the five former Soviet republics in Central Asia. It is made up mainly of desert, but it possesses the world&#8217;s fifth largest reserves of natural gas and has substantial deposits of oil. Naturally, therefore, it is of strategic interest to both the Russians and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}